Honey bees normally breed in nature without the aid of any apparatus. The female or queen bee is normally inseminated by a number of male or drone bees while the queen and the males are in flight. This process is known as "open mating." Open mating, however, does not permit human control over the mating process, making selective breeding nearly impossible. More importantly, a free-flying queen is susceptible to fertilization by undesirable Africanized bees which pass on their dangerous and non-productive traits to the queen's offspring.
Currently, controlled breeding is achieved by instrumental insemination with semen yielded by the desired male breeding stock. Instrumental insemination is insufficient for production colonies, and is time consuming. The process requires precision instruments and highly skilled operators. In addition, those queen bees fertilized by instrumental insemination generally produce substantially less offspring, with this reduction in fecundity further reducing the breeding efficiency.
Previous attempts at achieving free mating of bees in an enclosed chamber have been unsuccessful. The use of a point source of light to illuminate the chamber attracts the bees to the light and away from a queen bee. Also, previous chambers have been too large for effective free mating. A further disadvantage of previous chambers is that visible landmarks, such as the corners of a box-shaped enclosure, distract the drone bees from the mating process. In addition previous attempts at enclosed free mating have used a free flying queen bee. Because queen bees cannot effectively hover like drones, the queen flies through the chamber until it hits one of the walls. This can result in injury to the queen and reduces the likelihood of successful free mating.